MOVIE REVIEW: 'Free Fire' misses the mark

We all knew bullets are a boring implement, but not this boring, as the latest bit of gimmickry from Brit director Ben Wheatley (“Sightseers”) quickly grows redundant and repetitive.

By Al Alexander/For The Patriot Ledger

If you’re intrigued by a non-stop 70-minute gunfight often set to the strains – and I mean STRAINS – of John Denver’s treacly “Annie’s Song,” the film gods have got a movie for you. It’s called “Free Fire,” an unabashed Tarantino knockoff that proudly wears its snark on its rifle sleeve. But that’s about all it wears in unholstering munitions-fueled mayhem inside an abandoned Boston factory circa 1978. No one – well, almost no one – gets out alive, including a shell-shocked audience.

We all knew bullets are a boring implement, but not this boring, as the latest bit of gimmickry from Brit director Ben Wheatley (“Sightseers”) quickly grows redundant and repetitive. Along with his wife and writing partner, Amy Jump, Wheatley does nothing to hide his cynicism toward American gun culture. But he outsmarts himself by thinking us Yanks give a darn. If we did, Sandy Hook would have spawned massive gun reform. So, who is he preaching to? It’s certainly not to anyone in Trump country.

Even as pure satire, “Free Fire” fails to generate much in the way of laughs, at least not after the first 10 minutes, when we meet the dozen or so combatants, all of whom delivering one-liner insults like their fresh off the Borscht Belt. Talking in Wheatley’s ballistic terms, he empties all his guns in the first half hour, leaving him with 60 additional minutes of firing blanks. Even the considerable star power of Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy and Sharlto Copley can’t save him. But that talented quartet does keep you somewhat invested – at least initially. Although, it’s depressing to see Larson wasting her newfound Oscar clout playing a token woman fighting to keep her head above the raging flood of testosterone.

She’s Justine, an upper-crust facilitator, who – along with her bearded partner, Ord (Hammer) – is brokering an arms deal between members of the IRA (Murphy and Michael Smiley) and a crazed South African gunrunner (Copley) abetted by the gathering’s assorted meat-headed accomplices. As luck would have it (for Wheatley, anyway) one of the guys recently assaulted the cousin of an opposing goon, setting off a quickly escalating argument that leads not to fisticuffs, but an all-out firefight in which fully loaded chambers empty and teetering loyalties shift at the director’s will.

It’s a potentially exciting set-up that painfully lays bare Wheatley’s inability to stage a marathon action scene. Like a lot of directors today, he falsely believes the answer is loads of quick-cuts broken up by snide, allegedly humorous insults, like calling your foes “knuckle-draggers.” What is this, fifth grade? One can only imagine what a talent like Tarantino or the film’s producer, Martin Scorsese, could do to keep the material from sinking deeper and deeper into formula. At least we have John Denver, whose warbling voice is a welcome respite to the endless drone of gunfire and rote dialogue.

The performances are all over the map, with only Copley’s motor-mouthed Vernon providing any fun. Hammer and Larson pretty much sleepwalk through their underwritten roles, while Sam Riley and Jack Reynor try too hard to be goofy as the dunderheads who start the gunfight. As for Boston, other than a brief backdrop of the city’s skyline (which looks more like 2015 than 1978), you could be anywhere, including Brighton – as in Brighton, England – where the entire movie was filmed on a soundstage. It reminded me a lot of Wheatley’s last film, “High-Rise,” which was also contained inside a tight, confined space. It’s a sameness that underscores how much Wheatley’s violent exercises all feel the same. He and Jump approach filmmaking much like Woody Allen, spitting out a movie a year, each one a rumination on the last. But give them credit for one thing: they get us to see John Denver in a new, ironic way. When he sings of filling his senses, it reminds us how much Wheatley has overfilled ours with a busy, nonsensical movie that fires many shots, most of them missing their target. FREE FIRE (R for strong violence, pervasive language, sexual references and drug use.) Cast includes Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy and Sharlto Copley. Grade: C+